This is a great story i read back in 2008 in Wired Magazine and I have copied and pasted the short NY Times article version but you should read the entire Wire Mag article with all of the other juicy details left out on the readers digest version.
[bold]This just goes to prove you shouldn't believe anyone is real online and you can't expect to really meet anyone online anyway as you never know who they are.
Really just a true Catfish story of idiots dealing with con artists....they will always be on the net...[/bold]
Internet love triangle
BY
David J. Krajicek
Saturday, February 16, 2008, 4:54 PM
Jessi was a 17-year-old hottie, a long-legged blond who enticed her man Tommy by mailing him gifts of her G-string panties, size small.
Tommy was a war hero - a rock-hard Marine who had served in Iraq. He boasted to Jessi that he had been blessed with prodigious sexual endowment.
They did not get a chance to confirm their relative dimensions since they never met in person. But in thousands of e-mails, phone calls and instant messages, the would-be lovers planned their life - Tommy and Jessi 2gethr4evr.
They were teenagers in love - on the Internet.
In real life, she was Mary Sheiler, a chubby, middle-aged wife and mom who lived in a plain little house in West Virginia. And he was Tom Montgomery, a balding, paunchy factory worker from the modest Buffalo suburb of Cheektowaga. He was married, with daughters ages 12 and 14.
Their make-believe love might not have troubled anyone but their spouses until an innocent third man was drawn in, touching off a Bermuda Triangle of Internet love, with deadly consequences.
Peaches and scream
Montgomery and Sheiler met online in the spring of 2005 at Pogo.com, a game Web site. Montgomery missed a clue to her real age in her username: "TalHotBlondBig50." She soon changed her handle to "Peaches_06_17."
Sheiler had a teen *******, Jessica, a pretty blond who had been named Miss Oak Leaf Festival 2002 in their hometown of Oak Hill, a West Virginia city of 6,500 about 40 miles south of Charleston.
Sheiler assumed the *******'s identity online, using the name Jessi and pretending that she was the pretty girl pictured on the teen's personal Web page.
Montgomery, meanwhile, created a fantasy bio of his own, complete with Marine war stories. And if those lies weren't complicated enough, Montgomery sometimes posed online as Tommy's *******.
In one message, he warned Jessi to go easy with Tommy's tender heart "because u will hurt him and he's an idiot and will believe ur lying ass."
The fantasy transformed Montgomery from a responsible adult to a love-obsessed adolescent. He spoke to Jessi by phone twice a day, and they instant messaged incessantly - often all night long.
"He wouldn't get off the Internet," his wife, Cindy, later told a reporter.
Tommy proposed marriage at Christmas 2005, and Jessi accepted. Montgomery began telling friends at work that he was leaving his wife to be with his new love in West Virginia. He didn't mention that she was 17.
In February 2006, Cindy Montgomery found a stash of lingerie that Jessi had mailed to Tommy. Through computer detective work, she unraveled her husband's Internet relationship with the presumed teenager.
In a letter confronting her husband, Cindy wrote, "What I cannot believe is that you are living out some bizarre fantasy - as ******* and *******."
The wife then sent a letter to Jessi that included a family photo, explaining that her husband had been posing as Tommy.
"From what I am pulling from your letters," Cindy wrote, "you are much closer to my *******'s age than mine, let alone Tom's. Are you over the age of 18? In this alone, he can be prosecuted as a baby predator."
Jessi was flummoxed to learn that her fantasy creation had been fooled by another.
She turned to Pogo.com for confirmation of the wife's letter, exchanging messages with Brian Barrett, 22, a co-worker at Montgomery's factory who frequented the game Web site.
Yes, Barrett said, Tommy was a middle-aged man, not a young stud.
Sheiler began flirting online with Barrett, and the two spread the story of Montgomery's fantasy identity on the Web site and at the factory. Montgomery was enraged. "U can say goodbye forever to me and Tommy," he wrote to Jessi.
Barrett and Jessi taunted Montgomery with their own budding Web romance, and the three exchanged angry messages for months.
On Sept. 13, 2006, Montgomery sent Jessi an instant message at 1:30 in the morning: "u r a whore and thats all u will ever be."
He followed that with a series of fuming, obscene computer and phone messages over the following two days.
Last ride
At 10:15 p.m. on Sept. 16, Brian Barrett left work at the factory in Clarence, N.Y., and got into his pickup. As he closed the door three rifle shots rang out. Barrett was hit in the neck, and he slumped over dead.
The victim's phone and computer records, as well as factory gossip, led investigators to Tom Montgomery and Mary Sheiler, and the make-believe love of the middle-agers became a crime spectacle.
Sheiler escaped indictment, so she has not been compelled to answer questions of how she had permitted the creepy fantasy to escalate into violence.
In her only interview, with Wired magazine, she portrayed herself as a devoted wife and doting mom. She explained that the Internet love triangle was a giggle that got out of hand.
Montgomery, meanwhile, was charged with *******. His wife divorced him, his daughters disowned him, and he attempted suicide in his jail cell.
He pleaded guilty last year to first-degree manslaughter.
At his sentencing on Nov. 27, everyone in court wondered about what had come over the formerly rational man.
"Call it an obsession, call it an addiction, call it what you want," said defense attorney John Nuchereno. "He was suffering from a diminished capacity of some sort."
"My wife and I don't understand how this could happen," said the victim's *******, Daniel. "To gun down a boy over simple jealousy does not make sense to us."
Montgomery was sent to prison for 20 years.
Prosecutor Frank Sedita noted, "You can pretend to be whoever you want to be on the Internet."
But not in prison. Montgomery has a transparent identity now at Attica, 20 miles west of the home he shared with his family in Cheektowaga before meeting Jessi online.
He is inmate number 07B3808. He is 48 years old today and will be 65 on his first parole eligibility date, in 2024.
dkrajicek@aol.com
source:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/internet-love-triangle-article-1.311952
Read the amazing full/longer Wired mag article with the IM/Text messages included here:
http://www.wired.com/2007/08/ff-internetlies/
xxx muuuaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh
